Outside Fox News, Ailes’s Other Nemeses Speak Up

Roger Ailes ruled Fox News with an iron will. But that attitude could inform his behavior outside the office, and in perplexing ways. A month after he resigned his post, three unexpected Ailes adversaries recall their stories.

At 3:20 on a summer Saturday afternoon, three days after longtime Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual-harassment lawsuit against her former boss Roger Ailes, Carlson’s attorney received an unexpected e-mail. A lot had happened in the intervening days; a handful of other women had come forward publicly with their own allegations. Still others had reached out privately to Carlson’s attorney, Nancy Erika Smith. Some of the accusations Smith heard went back five decades. (Ailes has fervently and repeatedly denied these allegations.)

Then the e-mail arrived. “We strongly request that you cease and desist from your virtually non-stop media campaign to smear Roger Ailes with numerous untrue allegations, some dating back more than 50 years, long before Fox News came into existence,” read the e-mail from Ailes’s counsel, David Garland. “Mr. Ailes has been and will continue to closely monitor your unlawful conduct in the media and take steps to hold you responsible.”

Smith, who has authored her share of legal letters, found the e-mail to be “thuggish,” but its tenor appears consistent with how some say Ailes ran Fox News. “Roger ruled with a heavy dose of implied threats—to journalists, staff, and even colleagues who didn’t work for him—and psychological games,” former News Corp P.R. executive Andrew Butcher recently told V.F. contributing editor Sarah Ellison. As Gabriel Sherman has reported in New York, the network housed a “Black Room” where political operatives and private detectives surveyed Ailes’s designated targets. Decades earlier, Ailes had [allegedly threatened] to send a camera crew to monitor the young children of Kurt Andersen, now a V.F. contributing editor, who was then writing a story about Rush Limbaugh.

Ailes’s rough tactics helped him achieve enormous influence on the national stage. But the former advisor to Richard Nixon also seemed to have a hard time flipping that switch off even against adversaries who posed no real direct threat to his professional power, or to anyone’s power, really. And his weapons of choice have long been strongly worded legal letters carrying the threat of expensive, debilitating lawsuits—even against comparatively powerless foes.

In 2003, for instance, Al Franken was well into his book tour in support of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right when he spoke at a convention that happened to be broadcast on C-SPAN. The liberal comic, who would eventually become a liberal Minnesota senator, subsequently did a bit about Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. The anchor’s visage appeared on the book’s cover, after all, grouped with those of Ann Coulter, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney, under the cherry-red stamp of the word “Lies.”

It seemed like a spoof, but soon afterward Franken and his publishers received a legal letter from Fox News, where Ailes was C.E.O., threatening a lawsuit if they did not change the book’s subtitle, which spoofed the network’s famous slogan. By then, the book had already been printed and delivered to stores. Franken, perhaps opportunistically, saw the letter less as a legal threat than a potential and unexpected sales boon. “I was delighted. I thought it was fabulous,” Franken told me recently. “I thought our response to the letter should have been, ‘Please, please, please sue us.’ I knew we were totally within our rights, so I knew that not only would they lose, but it would bring a lot of publicity to the book.” (An attorney for Ailes did not respond to repeated requests to comment for this story.)

Fox News granted his wish, requesting an injunction to block Franken from using the phrase “fair and balanced” on the cover. Less than two weeks after the network filed suit, however, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin tossed the case out of court. He called the suit “wholly without merit, both factually and legally,” and said anyone who didn’t realize the cover was intended as a joke would have to be “completely dense.” (“I said instead of ‘Fair and Balanced,’ ‘Wholly Without Merit’ would be a better slogan [for Fox News] anyway,” Franken recalled.)

But Franken’s ordeal was only beginning. In a brief, Fox News attorneys referred to him as a “parasite,” “shrill,” and “unstable,” with views that “lack any serious depth or insight,” and as an “increasingly unfunny . . . C-level political commentator.” This language irked Franken. But far more troubling was the fact that the lawyers had included his home address in the public court filing. “That seemed threatening in a way that is uncalled for in our society,” he said. “My wife, especially, was not happy about that. That just isn’t done. It was really not kosher.”

A year later, in a sexual-harassment lawsuit filed against O’Reilly, the anchor was quoted as allegedly saying, “If you cross Fox News Channel, it’s not just me, it’s Roger Ailes who will go after you. . . . Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day, bam! The person gets what’s coming to them but never sees it coming. Look at Al Franken; one day he’s going to get a knock on his door and life as he’s known it will change forever.” (O’Reilly settled the sexual-harassment suit out of court. Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The proverbial knock has yet to come for Franken. But he says he has not been shocked by the recent allegations against his former tormentor. “Nothing surprises me about what’s come out,” he told me. “Actually, it’s a little surprising because it’s so egregious.”

by Gabriella Demczuk/Getty Images.

Ailes’s network may have functioned as his personal political megaphone, but it was also an extraordinarily successful business that created some $1 billion in annual profit. Ailes himself lived comfortably, and enjoyed a 9,000-square-foot weekend house in Putnam County that overlooked the Hudson River. In 2008, Ailes and his wife, Elizabeth, further cemented their ties with the community by purchasing the dusty local newspaper, The Putnam County News & Recorder. (Elizabeth Ailes is listed as the *P.C.N.R.’*s publisher; Roger Ailes is not.)

Not everyone in the region was happy about the transaction. Tensions simmered almost immediately after local liberals spotted what they saw as partisan, agenda-motivated coverage. The controversy came to a head in 2014, over a proposed development and a contentious local election. Certain liberals in Cold Spring were wary of what the development would do to their community, and even more wary of what they saw as the *P.C.N.R.’*s slanted coverage in favor of it.

Amid the turmoil, the folk singer Dar Williams co-authored with her husband a letter encouraging a few younger locals, who were living in the city, to send in absentee ballots, asking them to vote in favor of a few candidates who were similarly skeptical of the development plans, including town trustee Matt Francisco.

Williams and her husband wrote that Ailes, whom they called “owner of Fox News and of our little newspaper,” was an interested party in the outcome of the election. (Ailes was, in fact, the C.E.O. of Fox News; his wife was the publisher of the P.C.N.R.) “I don’t know if you are too young to remember what Fox News did ten years ago to the war hero, John Kerry, when he ran against George W. Bush . . . they managed to turn him into a coward (the ‘Swiftboat’ attack ads) even as their stories were completely debunked,” the two-page letter read. “They’re using the exact same tactics here in our tiny village.”

“I thought, Why the hell would a man in his position in the world be
bothered by a trustee in a village in New York state with a population
of 2,015 people?”

A month after the couple sent the letter, and a week before polls opened, portions of it wound up printed on the front page of the P.C.N.R., under the headline “Nasty Campaign Letter Surfaces.” Williams recalls that sections of it were redacted, but the paper left her home address, which was printed at the top of the letter. The article also noted that Francisco had been spotted leaving Williams’s house. Perturbed that someone was checking on his whereabouts, Francisco wrote a post on Facebook later that day explaining that he was worried about being followed. Stephanie Hawkins, a sitting trustee on the town’s board, shared Francisco’s post on her personal Facebook page.

Within 48 hours, Williams received a legal letter asking her to apologize to Roger and Elizabeth Ailes, or face a suit against her for defamation. The letter was sent by Peter Johnson, an attorney who often appeared on Fox News and, according to New York, was a member of the so-called “Black Room.” It said Williams had falsely identified Ailes as the owner of Fox News and of the P.C.N.R., falsely accused him of engineering the Swift Boat campaign, and falsely claimed that he had any interest in the upcoming Putnam County election.

Francisco and Hawkins were also served letters asking them to take down their Facebook posts. Johnson wrote to Hawkins that the contents of her posts were “knowingly false and fabricated,” with the “malicious intent to injure our clients in their trade, office, and profession.” The letter cautioned that if she did not write a retraction for “the libelous statements and an apology for the outrageous and patently false statements made against our clients,” then Ailes would file suit against her for “intentionally, wrongfully, and maliciously [defaming] and [disparaging]” them, and would also seek attorneys’ fees and expenses. Francisco took his post down. Hawkins, on principle, kept hers up.

Over the course of 12 days, the letter was followed up with two more, the last of which was sent to her place of work. “I thought, Why the hell would a man in his position in the world be bothered by a trustee in a village in New York state with a population of 2,015 people? And it’s based on a precarious association with my personal social media,” Hawkins said. “What is wrong with this person?”

In the end, the developer’s proposal was approved and Ailes’s lawyers dropped their threats after the election. But many in Cold Spring have not forgotten the incident. Hawkins was in her office when she saw the news that Roger Ailes had resigned from Fox News. A cry slipped out of her, one loud enough that it prompted a co-worker to come by to make sure she was O.K. “It was kind of a relief,” she said. “That self-righteous ass doth protest too much. It has given me a very strong sense of Schadenfreude.”

Her neighbor, Dar Williams, expressed her own reaction in words worthy of a folk singer. “When these allegations came up, that sense of cruelty, that I-will-humiliate-you, I-will-expose-you, I-will-find-you-at-your-most-vulnerable-place rang true for me. It’s about how one uses and abuses power,” she said. And until now, “It was about power that hurts the most without leaving fingerprints, so that people stayed silent.”